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The web received a shiny new gift Wednesday morning — a truly open and royalty-free video codec for HTML5 web pages. The new open media project called WebM; the VP8 codec is at the center of it. All Free and Open Source.

Apple and Microsoft join to fight Opera and Firefox. The next big evolution of the Internet will be in the realm of video playing. Until now the rapid growth of online video has been built on Adobe's Flash technology. Flash has always been a workable solution but not the best platform because it requires an additional plugin to be installed before users can view video.

You've heard all of the advantages that HTML5 brings to your web experience, but how far away are we from enjoying the benefits of HTML5? With several browsers already supporting HTML5 video, I selected Google Chromium which was available for my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop and gave it a try.

So here it is, prepare for some stunning screenshots and much magnificent marketing mash :-) . Article doesn't talk about the technical/coding stuff, just about what you get at the moment. Details will be for another post.

Jobs replied, saying that “[a] patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other open source codecs now.” The news spread like wildfire. This episode provides a good example of how software patents harm innovation and why they are ultimately incompatible with Free Software. Any program - Free Software or not - is threatened by patents.

"With the introduction of HTML5 and its implementation in all major web browsers, it's becoming clear that Adobe is now in a place where a lack of innovation from the company could cause not only a loss of profit for Adobe, but also the eventual abandonment and deprecation of the product "Adobe Flash" by every product and service that currently supports it."

Puredyne is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution aimed at creative people. It provides a number of creative applications, alongside a solid set of graphic, audio and video tools in a fast, minimal package. It includes software for everything an artist might need - from sound art to innovative film-making.

"Apart from many performance improvements and an official 64bit version, "Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 Pre" doesn't have many new features that 3.6 doesn't already have." ... "Another new thing we noticed is the ability to resize text boxes (textarea tags.) The video below shows the feature being used on the InaTux.com forms..."

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Debian Lenny.

What journalists are missing out on is that H.264 is a patented codec, and that the patent holders expect to collect royalties. The last H.264 patents expire in 2028. Mr. Blizzard draws some apt parallels with GIF and MP3, and the problems caused when patented, royalty-burdened technologies collide with a supposedly open and unencumbered Web.

The Ubuntu release schedule isn't always clear to everyone. There's the regular releases, the LTS releases, server releases, and Alpha, Beta, Omega, and Zeta releases. OK, the last two were fake, but it can all get pretty confusing to new users.